Nickel-and-dimed in public housing?

Monday

Oct 8, 2012 at 12:01 AMOct 8, 2012 at 6:50 AM

Living in public housing with a fixed income is rough enough, so it got our attention when a handful of people phoned the newsroom accusing the New Bedford Housing Authority of nickel-and-diming them over routine repairs.

Living in public housing with a fixed income is rough enough, so it got our attention when a handful of people phoned the newsroom accusing the New Bedford Housing Authority of nickel-and-diming them over routine repairs that ought to be the government's responsibility.

Elizabeth Watkins, a senior who lives in the state-owned Parkdale units on Rockdale Avenue, was especially ticked that she was charged $150 because she called the Fire Department when her building's boiler went berserk and filled five units with steam.

Another $8 for a shoddy repair to a window screen bothered her, too. "They're charging us for repairs to their own real property," she said.

Another senior tenant, who didn't want to be identified, alleged that the Housing Authority made her replace her stove at a cost of $390.

When Watkins complained, the authority gave her a copy of what's known as the "charge list," three pages of itemized expenses for everything from drip pans for stoves to doors and bathroom fixtures.

If you live in public housing, your unit is subject to a periodic review, and inspectors will notice things that are broken, damaged or missing. The authority will make a judgment call about who is responsible.

So here comes the gray area. Is the floor dirty enough to charge you for a repair? Does the refrigerator gasket have to be replaced because of the mildew you allowed to grow there? Is that window sash just plain old and worn out?

If it's the tenant's fault (in the judgment of the authority, naturally), then they get the charge list. These things will be fixed — shoddily, in the view of several tenants that I spoke with — and their accounts will be charged.

And if you move away without paying for damage, you won't ever get back in without settling your bill, said Steven Beauregard, the Housing Authority's executive director.

He's familiar with the complaints, but he pounced when I brought up the stove. "Nobody pays to replace a stove," he said, unless they were responsible for ruining it.

He said he spends a lot of time reviewing the inspections and charges and issuing waivers for many of them, but certainly not all.

"We're not trying to impose penalties. We want incentives to get people to treat units as if they were their own homes," he said.

Safety violations are an exception to the "no penalties" rule, though: The Housing Authority charges $100 if smoke detectors are removed or disabled. "We don't want you taking the battery and using it in your Game Boy," when safety is at stake, he said.

Truth be told, Parkdale is showing its age and even a well-maintained unit looks tired after 55 years. When was the last time you saw a steam radiator installed in a new home?

To add to the maintenance, Beauregard said that the authority has a small fleet of trash trucks that do nothing but circulate through the developments and collect trash. Plenty of it, he said, comes from outside the public housing, even outside the city, as people avoid trash fees.

When the city finds violations, he said, "they charge me $100." So, another penalty: $100 for open trash containers. "We don't need rats and sea gulls," said Beauregard.

These charges are not new, they go back generations, he said. Fall River has the same system, said James Comer, their director of field operations.

One difference is that in Fall River different rates are charged in some cases depending on whether the unit is state or federal financed.

Beauregard said that the federal government imposes stricter standards than the state in exchange for higher annual support. It's easy to tell the difference between state and federally owned when looking at public housing, he said.

It is also an incentive to start looking at upgrades to meet the higher standards, upgrade to a federally owned unit, and get some long overdue repairs and upgrades done. Good. Do it. I'd say, put Parkdale on that list.

Steve Urbon's column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in The Standard-Times and at SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached at 508-979-4448 or surbon@s-t.com